Nvidia Is Currently “Looking Into” GTX 970 VRAM Issue

There is hardly any GPU which beats Nvidia’s GTX 970 under the price tag of mere $350, thanks to its Maxwell architecture. The card, indeed, offers an excellent performance on benchmarks and is well received by PC community. However, it seems like there’s a stain on the GPU’s otherwise splendid reputation.

A group of users at OverClock.Net ran the GPU through a couple of benchmarks and found that the last 700MB or more of GTX 970’s 4GB of VRAM doesn’t get used. According to these stats, the GPU begins to struggle when it goes past 3.3GB of VRAM. Luckily, another GPU belonging to Nvidia’s 900-series, GTX 980 doesn’t face any issue like this.

Following are the benchmark results of both GTX 970 and GTX 980:

From the start of this year, several users reported that the card begins to suffer from stuttering during certain sequences and environments – which can be attributed to these results. Nvidia didn’t pay much heed to this issue, but a moderator at GeForce stated that the company is looking into the matter:

We are still looking into this and will have an update as soon as possible.

There are several reports indicating that the issue is related to hardware. If this indeed turns out to be true then sadly there won’t be any fix to address this issue. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!